Identity, please

During Fiction Days, a novelist encourages student writers to endow their characters with cultural roots

Mengestu: “The loneliness of an immigrant is the loneliness of every other human being out there.” Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

On the day he arrived at Georgetown University as a freshman in the mid-1990s, Dinaw Mengestu threw some books into a bag and left campus, searching for a coffee shop where he could fulfill his fantasy of being a writer. After several hours walking the streets of Washington, D.C., he had to admit to himself that he was lost.

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“I finally found a 7-Eleven and got a Slurpee, and wrote on a park bench like that’s where I was supposed to be all along,” Mengestu told a group of students around a conference table at Boston College on a rainy afternoon. “Later on it seemed like a metaphor for writing. You begin with a strange sort of confidence and then you end up lost and alone and try to find your way back to where you thought you were going.”

Mengestu was on Boston College’s campus April 8, for a talk that evening as part of the Lowell Humanities Series. He sat down beforehand for informal conversation with some 20 English and African and African diaspora studies (AADS) students at 10 Stone Avenue, home of the Institute for the Liberal Arts, which, with the English department’s Fiction Days and AADS, cosponsored his visit. Mengestu is the author of three beautifully spare novels about immigrants and immigrant identity in America. In 2010, he was named to the New Yorker‘s list of 20 fiction writers under 40 who would be “key to their generation,” and in 2012 he was chosen a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow.

As the rain dripped on the pine trees outside the window, Mengestu opened up in an hourlong conversation about the search for his own identity as a novelist. “The process of writing a novel sounds incredibly daunting,” observed a student, who identified herself as a writer of short stories. “Can you think back to your first experience writing a novel?”

“I’m so daunted by the idea of writing in general, I didn’t want to say I was a writer even when I was doing an MFA,” Mengestu confessed. “I found ways of trying to avoid naming this strange task of wanting to tell stories.” Born in 1978, Mengestu came to the United States from Ethiopia when he was just two years old, settling in Peoria, Illinois, where he had a “super-American childhood, with hot dogs and picnics and church and baseball.” As a teenager, he said, he tried on different identities—black, Ethiopian, African, Ethiopian-American—but none of them seemed to fit.

During that fine arts master’s program at Columbia University, he took his first stab at writing a novel about a group of friends in a Midwestern town. “I managed to create a bunch of characters and strip them of all possible identity—they were not black, they were not white,” he told students. “I didn’t want to write a novel that ran the risk of belonging over there, with those books.”

“I’ve been wondering how culture plays into your writing,” said another student, who continued, “there was one time when I actually finished a short story and I had no idea what I wanted my character to look like, and so I played it safe and made her like me—how has that sort of played out for you?”

“It’s a huge part,” he said. “Sometimes I feel like we are uncomfortable naming the cultural identities of our characters because we feel like it is going to somehow isolate them from other people. I think our task as writers is not to strip our characters of any of those things, but to find out how rich they become, the more dimensions we give them.”

After his first manuscript was rejected by countless agents and publishers, said Mengestu, he again found himself wandering down the street in Washington, when a name popped into his head: Sepha Stephanos. Suddenly, he found himself writing a new book about an Ethiopian immigrant in D.C. who’d fled the “Red Terror” uprising in the 1970s and settled, eventually, to run a grocery store in a neighborhood of the city going through gentrification. Published in 2007 as The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, the book was hailed as a quiet masterpiece, tracing the main character’s observations as he wanders the streets, caught between living his new life and remembering those whom he left behind.

By embracing the cultural identities of his characters, said Mengestu, he made their suffering accessible. “The loneliness of an immigrant is the loneliness of every other human being out there, it’s just more dramatic,” he told students. “You’ll walk into a lot of rooms in your life where you will feel lonely. The important thing is that breakthrough where you can see someone on the other side of the table who really sees you.”

That struggle for connection across cultural divides pervades his most recent novel, All Our Names, published last year, which follows the journey of a bookish Ethiopian refugee from Uganda’s civil war in the 1970s, as he is introduced to Midwestern America by Helen, a young social worker. Mengestu writes alternately from the young man’s and Helen’s points of view, as each strives to create an identity beyond their respective pasts. The main character doesn’t have a consistent name, instead taking on a series of nicknames as he sheds countries. “Part of the struggle of the narrative is . . . for them to define who they are and how they see themselves,” Mengestu answered when one of the students asked why he made that choice. “It happens a lot, especially in college, where you get these questions like, Where are you from? Who are you? People are eager to cast you into these singular solutions. I think our identities can be and perhaps should be much more fluid and much more layered,” he said, to nods around the table.

Later, Mengestu took his themes and characters to Devlin 101, where he spoke and read in front of a standing-room-only crowd.